The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Excerpt

This book is an epistle from a wounded lover. As one who is in love with the life of the mind but who has also been drawn to faith in Christ through the love of evangelical Protestants, I find myself in a situation where wounding is commonplace. Although the thought has occurred to me regularly over the past two decades that, at least in the United States, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual, this epistle is not a letter of resignation from the evangelical movement. It intends rather to be a cri du coeur on behalf of the intellectual life by one who, for very personal reasons, still embraces the Christian faith in an evangelical form.

As one might expect from an evangelical on such a subject, this is not a thoroughly intellectual volume. It is rather a historical meditation in which sermonizing and the making of hypotheses vie with more ordinary exposition. It is meant to incite more than it is meant to inform. The notes are here to show where fuller academic treatments, a few of them by myself, may be found. Several of the chapters were first given as talks or lectures, although everything has been rewritten for this volume.

The book is dedicated with gratitude and respect to my colleagues at Wheaton College, where we together fight the fights and inflict, sometimes on each other, the wounds that are the subject of this book.